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I've fallen in love with this crazy minimalist turntable

Move over Bang & Olufsen: The Wheel, by Dutch company Miniot, is turntable design at its simplest and most lovely.

Ty Pendlebury Editor
Ty Pendlebury is a journalism graduate of RMIT Melbourne, and has worked at CNET since 2006. He lives in New York City where he writes about streaming and home audio.
Expertise Ty has worked for radio, print, and online publications, and has been writing about home entertainment since 2004. He majored in Cinema Studies when studying at RMIT. He is an avid record collector and streaming music enthusiast. Credentials
  • Ty was nominated for Best New Journalist at the Australian IT Journalism awards, but he has only ever won one thing. As a youth, he was awarded a free session for the photography studio at a local supermarket.
Ty Pendlebury
2 min read
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Miniot

Some people marry the Eiffel Tower, some even their motorbike, but has anyone ever given thought to wedding the humble turntable?

Forget levitating turntables and forget Bluetooth lint brushes. Here is the "novelty" turntable I might even consider buying (if not actually commit bigamy for). The Wheel by Dutch design firm Miniot is as minimalist as a turntable could possibly get. It's just a wooden record platter that can be mounted on a tabletop or even on a wall.

Miniot/GIF by Nick Hide/CNET

But how do you operate it? And how does it even?

Firstly, the central spindle is smarter than any I've ever seen. Not only does it hold the record in place but it also acts as a power switch and controller. Twist it to turn it on and off, tap it to pause and even skip tracks by clicking it left or right.

Skip tracks? Yes, the smarts don't end at the spindle. Underneath the record sits the other ingenious part: a linear tracking arm fitted with a modified AT95 cartridge and an infrared track sensor.

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Miniot

You can't replace the cartridge, which might disappoint tweakers who want to spend more than $100 on their own cartridge, but at least the stylus is removable. The tonearm it's connected to is carved from a piece of laminated mahogany.

As the inner workings of the turntable would be exposed without a record on it, the makers will ship a transparent LP as a dust cover (it also includes "great music from the best Dutch musicians we know of").

The Wheel is available in a choice of walnut, cherry or mahogany or a limited-edition rosewood. If you want to actually connect the turntable so you can listen to it (and not just ogle it) the Wheel comes with a switchable phono stage, stereo RCA out and even a headphone jack.

But a love like this never comes without some sacrifice. Expect to pay 568 euros (about $600, £485 or AU$785) or more for the turntable on Kickstarter right now. The units are due to ship worldwide in November.